Minnesota Child Care Providers Try to Stay Afloat as Families Keep Kids Home

Two weeks into January, the director of a St. Paul child care center called a family to ask why their daughter had been absent on-and-off since late last year. “We reached out to just see, ‘Hey, what’s going on? Is your child sick?’” said Angela Clair, whose child care center serves more than 70 children. The girl’s mother answered the phone. “ICE is in our neighborhood every…
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Under Trump, Concerns Grow Over Grant Guidelines for Libraries and Museums

A library in rural Alaska needed help providing free Wi-Fi and getting kids to read. A children’s museum in Washington wanted to expand its Little Science Lab. And a World War I museum in Missouri had a raft of historic documents it needed to digitize. They received funding from a little-known federal agency before the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to dismantle it last year.
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Supreme Court Is Going to New Lengths to Hide Its Inner Workings From Scrutiny

Two weeks after the November 2024 election of Donald Trump, the Supreme Court instituted a new policy to hide its actions from public scrutiny, according to a recent report in The New York Times. Chief Justice John Roberts told the court’s employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement pledging to keep the court’s internal workings secret. Although employees of the court have long been compelled…
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The UK’s Anti-Migrant Right Is Surging. Local Elections Will Test Their Power.

In recent months, as the anti-immigrant Reform U.K. Party surged to the top of the polls, the U.K.’s Labour government has sought to make it harder for immigrants to get “indefinite leave to remain” — essentially a British version of the U.S. green card — as well as restrict access to benefits for immigrants. Currently, immigrants can seek “indefinite leave to remain” after five years in the…
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Noem Faces More Calls to Resign After Gutting FEMA, Abandoning Disaster Victims

Secretary Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was already facing scrutiny as temperatures plunged and winter storms rolled across much of the United States at the end of January. The expansive winter storms came just after immigration officers ultimately under her command killed two people in Minnesota. The killings heightened public anger against Immigration and Customs…
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Anti-ICE Organizing Is Creating Counter-Institutions Based on Care

The U.S.’s political landscape — and our daily lives — are increasingly shaped by repression and violence, amplified by a media cycle designed to keep us fearful in the present, uncertain about the future, and depleted. Exhaustion is not a side effect of this system. It is one of its core tools. Last year, I wrote that Donald Trump’s attacks were designed to exhaust us. Over the past year, I’…
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